The Census Conundrum – Why Businesses Can’t Settle for Less Than 100% Coverage

Have you ever tried to figure out the entirety of your infrastructure? Not just what you know about, but what you didn’t know about too? Past employees who set up dev environments and never passed along that knowledge, departments in other countries that run their own systems, other domains that are connected but no one ever uses? Well, “Mr. IT man who works as HQ”, says your boss, “go figure out a cloud strategy”. Shoot. Now What?

Well, you’re going to need something that offers:

Comprehensive insights

Requires no change to existing infrastructure

Doesn’t impact system performance

Doesn’t flood the network

Doesn’t require multiple collection/consolidation points

Requires no expensive infrastructure to deploy

Supports both local and remote scanning

Can be run centrally, locally or via existing automation infrastructure

Is surgical by design (collects what is needed)

Can collect both point in time (inventory) data and ongoing (actual resource consumption) data

Automatically integrates data collected anywhere in the world

And wraps it all up in a pretty bow with a baked in cloud migration strategy

Small enough list for you?

These things are all fantastic, but they amount to zero if you can’t retrieve all of the needed results.

The Census Conundrum

Inventorying your environment to 100% coverage is just like conducting a Census. We can have the most well-trained people, develop the easiest to understand forms, test the accuracy of our mailing lists, and spend years educating the public on how to complete the form and why it’s so important. But, this is all for nothing if the results aren’t completed and retrieved.

So, how does the Census Bureau manage this? They employ over 1 million field representatives (think about temporarily hiring Walmart) to go door to door to drive the completeness of their dataset as high as possible. It’s this concept of completeness that ultimately drives value. How do we justify spending over $4 billion on a Census if it’s only 50% complete? The same applies to IT discovery and scanning.

Lots of time and money can be spent implementing a solution, but this doesn’t guarantee success if success is ultimately assessed based on the quality and completeness of the results it produces. You could have the most amazing solution in the world, but if the data it gathers is incomplete, or worse, does not provide the user with any completeness insights (the head in the sand/ignorance is bliss approach), then get the surprises and excuses ready.

What’s the Rub?

Originally, Movere ARC bots leveraged a series of safety checks designed to gracefully exit an ARC Scan if the required source data or system resources were unavailable. This is like a Census field representative knocking on a door when nobody’s home. However, what hadn’t been factored into our graceful exit strategy was what to do if someone’s home, but they may not be able to read the Census form, they may not be able to answer every question, or they may not have the time available to complete every question. For a Census rep, they could offer help, return later or simply tick that house off their list as unable to respond.

Movere Focuses on Completeness – Introducing the New Smart ARC Bot

Keeping with our goal of completeness, we made our ARC bots smarter. Having scanned millions of Windows and Linux devices and enumerated billions of processors we had one huge advantage, data. This data revealed an unexpected anomaly, process enumeration speed. The device was “home”, and was willing to answer our questions, but it did not have the ability to respond to all the questions Movere was asking within the allotted timeframe.

The need was obvious, give the ARC bots the intelligence they need to make on the spot judgement calls. In situations where a device was “home” but unable to answer every question, Movere ARC bots now automatically switch to a reduced set of questions. These questions, while not giving us everything we seek, still provide us with the ability to size for the cloud and assess actual resource consumption across CPU, memory, and storage. We get our cake and we get to eat IT to.

This is why completeness is so important, we can make all sorts of excuses for a device not returning data, it’s old, network congestion, is running an unsupported OS, has trust issues, or the user lacks permission etc., but our goal is to achieve the same level of completeness, 95% or higher, when we both inventory a device AND seek actual resource consumption data from it.

Movere, the Census Master

What does completeness turn into? Now, when you go back to your boss to offer a cloud migration strategy, you can confidently confirm that you have a complete inventory of all the systems and machines that will need to be considered during your financial and migration planning. Movere also offers cloud sizings, making it easy to model and price out different cloud scenarios.

Movere also comes with:

No installations

Light weight footprint

Short scanning time

Cleans up after itself

Can be run to include or exclude user PII data

Can anonymize data during collection even before any encryption is applied

Encrypts data in memory before anything is written to disk

Protects data both at rest and during transmission

Is SOC2 certified

Requires no ongoing system administration

Run your IT environment with confidence, ease, and more than anything, complete understanding of everything running in it.

About Andrew Ireland

Prior to founding Unified Logic, Andrew worked with leading technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Symantec, Attachmate and Adobe. He earned his Bachelor of Commerce degree and Graduate Certificate of Computing from La Trobe University.